John Geli, vice president of DST Retirement Solutions, doesn't purport to have a crystal ball.

Just exactly what the Department of Labor's finalized fiduciary rule will mean for recordkeepers, plan sponsors, and their advisors can't be fully known until the rule is posted.

But that doesn't mean he and his team are sitting on their hands, says Geli.

“We're talking to advisors and stakeholders every day, leveraging thought leadership, allocating budgets, and preparing to rollout compliance solutions for whatever comes out,” said Geli.

“The hope is that anything that moves forward takes into account the goals of getting people better prepared for retirement, and that means increasing access to the right types of tools to get them there,” he said.

DST Systems, Inc., a global provider of benefits solutions that includes a recordkeeping business, third-party administration solutions, a broker-dealer, and a suite of management and compliance tools for plan advisors, acquired Wealth Management Systems, Inc. for $64 million last August.

Geli was CEO of WMSI at the time, which was founded in 2000 as a technology consulting company.

In 2004, WMSI introduced its Advisor Rollover Network, an open architecture platform of 16 different IRA providers that helps sponsors and advisors deliver non-conflicted rollover strategies to plan participants.

Read: 401(k) technology brings innovation to retirement advising

Along with the rollover platform, DST acquired WMSI's suite of advisor services tools, which give access to open architecture investment benchmarking services, and connects advisors to the universe of recordkeeping data on retirement plans, as well as specific data on plan participants.

DST also gains WMSI's customized education and communication capabilities

Whatever the DOL's final rule looks like, few doubt that it won't dramatically affect how advisors can market rollover services to plan participants.

As proposed, the rule would require advisors to plans with less than $100 million in assets act as fiduciaries to sponsors.

It would also require advisors and brokers charge fees on IRA assets that are level to what participants were paying when the assets were in plan. And the proposal would make the offering of proprietary investment products exceedingly more complicated.

“We have really bright people who have been deeply invested in the issue for the past year,” explained Geli, who of course was also acquired by DST in the WMSI deal.

“We're actively working on a number of frameworks that will help advisors comply with a new rule—those of course can't be completed until a rule is in place and we know exactly what it looks like,” said Geli.

But the idea is to be ready to move, and quickly, when a final rule emerges, he said.

This week, Cambridge Investment Research, one of the largest privately owned independent broker-dealers in the country, announced it is using WMSI's IRA platform and management solutions to launch a new platform for its channel of 2,700 independent advisors, called the Cambridge Retirement Center.

It will offer plan-centric advisors the ability to be fiduciaries to sponsors and participants by offering fee-based solutions, along with communication and wellness solutions.

With $67 billion in total assets under management, Iowa-based Cambridge was an early adopter of a hybrid compensation model in the early 1990s.

Geli said WMSI has been in talks with Cambridge for some time—indicating the deal and product development's initiation is not necessarily a direct result of the DOL's effort to require all advisors to plans under the $100 million threshold be fiduciaries.

“No matter what the DOL finalizes, the platform we created with Cambridge has tremendous value for advisors,” said Geli. “The combination of WMSI's specialties and DST's recordkeeping capability will redefine the advisor experience with personalized, nimble, platform agnostic solutions across the full spectrum of the retirement lifecycle.”

As is, DST's core recordkeeping platform services more than seven million participants and $143 billion in assets in plans that range in size from startups to those with more than $1 billion in savings.

Geli expects the DOL's rule to create challenges for some advisors and opportunities for others. He says the new DST-WMSI capabilities will get advisors the solutions they need to benefit from what is expected to be a dramatically different plan advisor market.

“For some that will be our rollover solutions, for some that will be communication solutions, for some it will be our recordkeeping platform, and for others it will be all that we offer,” said Geli.

Instant Insights /

Leveraging new fiduciary capabilities for plan advisors

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